Over the Edge
by Jack Lecter
Summary: Very short, set in late S3. Wesley just got out of the hospital. Dark, angsty but not in the usual way. WARNING: Child abuse is present to a degree in this story.


Over The Edge

By The Shadower

Rating: R

Spoilers/Timeframe: Set just after Wesley gets out of the hospital is S3. No explicit spoilers beyond that.

AN: This is my second short piece. I would appreciate feedback, and I might write another if I get some. Good, bad, flames, whatever. Just tell me what you think.

WARNING: This is dark. And it deals with issues of child abuse. If you can't handle that, to bad.

The man with the scarred throat sets the box that holds the things he owns today on the floor in the room in which he would be sleeping tonight.

Glancing around at it quickly, he is mildly pleased to find it to his expectations. Cheep, tacky, and bare, at first glance the room is devoid of all personality. There is only the faint smell of urine to prove that it has, in fact, been occupied before.

But the scarred man knows the room has been used by a hundred crackheads, holed up for the night in a place they could call "safe", a place they could shoot poison into their veins without being arrested. And by a hundred whores, at least the ones high-class enough to turn their tricks in a room rather than in an alley or the back of some pickup truck. And by countless others, hundreds, thousands, all of them hiding.

Because this is a don't ask/don't tell motel, and what happens here stays here. There are no consequences.

Tomorrow he'll be out hunting demons again, because that is what he does, all he can do. All he knows.

Tonight, he will sleep, or at least drift into the waking doze he now calls sleeping.

With nothing left to do, he looks to the bed. The sheets were perhaps once white, but are now an ugly shade of brown and stained with things he doesn't want to think about.

And then he hears it.

A strangled cry, like so many in this part of the city. A plea for help that will not come.

But there is something different about this one, something _familiar_. A horror mingled with disbelief, an innocence possessed only by those who have not had time to see the world and see how awful it is.

It is the voice of a child.

And from somewhere in the back of Wesley's mind, comes the voice of another child, the child he used to be.

And he remembers his father.

And he remembers cowering in his bed at night, listening for the sound of the key in the lock of his bedroom door.

And he remembers wanting to cry out from the pain, but hearing his father's harsh voice whispering _"It'll be worse if you do. Then I'll REALLY hurt you."_

_**AND HE REMEMBERS**_.

And he turns, leaves, and follows the noise to the room next to his.

And he turns the knob, opens the door his neighbor was too drunk to lock. Drunk and horny.

The sight that greets him is UGLY and WRONG and FAMILIAR.

The man is staring at him, too slow in his drunkenness to respond, or even to remove his hand from the pants of the boy in front of him.

The boy has apparently passed out from the terror.

A moment passes, a moment Wesley uses just to look, and remember. Then the man says,

"Hey, who the fuck are you?"

And the answer comes to Wesley in a flash of knowledge that almost knocks him backwards.

"I'm your executioner."

Not all demons are inhuman.

And then the gun is in his hand. He doesn't know how it got there. It moves, seemingly without his will, up to point at the crotch of the man in front of him.

And it fires.

BANG!

And shifts in his hand to aim at one of the man's knees.

And fires again.

BANG!

Shift.

BANG!

Shift.

BANG!

Shift, and now it's aiming at the creature's head, and he's begging.

"Please, don't kill me man! Please don't kill me!"

Wesley lets the man beg for a moment before firing again.

BANG!

Blood on the sheets of the bed, terror in the eyes of the child.

And then he turns, without even looking at the kid down on the floor. He walks back to his room and lies on his stained and dirty bed and he sleeps. And he does not dream, and he does not worry that the pedophile will be found or the murder investigated.

Because this is a don't ask/don't tell motel, and what happens here stays here. There are no consequences.

Tomorrow he'll be out killing demons, and he will barely remember what he did tonight. He will have forgotten in a week.

But perhaps, the next time he sees one of these human _creatures_, he will take his gun into his hand and think.

Think about blood.

And terror.

And, just for a moment, about his father.


End file.
